The final month of the year is finally upon us, and with it comes a bountiful crop of new movies available on streaming to tide us over through winter.
We’ve highlighted the best of the best new movies on Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Hulu, and other streaming platforms in December 2022. Our list includes Bullet Train, the outrageous new action comedy from John Wick co-director David Leitch and starring Brad Pitt, 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou starring Bill Murray, a tender 2019 bromance about two men and a cow, and a neo-noir thriller and a classic revisionist Western drama to spice things up. If there’s a particular mood you’re looking for, we’ve got a movie for you.
New on Netflix
Bullet Train
Year: 2022
Run time: 2h 7m
Director: David Leitch
Cast: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
One of the greatest action movie traditions is taking a common, everyday location — say, a train — and promising an audience approximately two hours of outrageous violence in that mundane place. With that in mind, Bullet Train — named after Japan’s famous high-speed commuter rail — didn’t have to do much to succeed; some good fights featuring fun actors and a tidy ending would’ve been enough. But Leitch, with the help of a stellar cast including Brian Tyree Henry, Bad Bunny, Joey King, and lead Brad Pitt, turns Bullet Train into a nesting doll of misunderstandings and complications that compound into a steady stream of jokes and violence, gaining so much momentum that the only way to stop it is to blow it all up. —Joshua Rivera
Bullet Train is available to stream on Netflix starting Dec. 3.
New to Hulu
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Year: 2004
Run time: 1h 59m
Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett
You know what you’re getting with a Wes Anderson comedy, and Zissou is one of his best.
Dedicated to the legendary French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, Murray plays the Cousteau-like documentarian Steve Zissou, who embarks on a stubborn quest to find and kill the shark who killed his best friend.
Featuring a sprawling cast of Anderson regulars and an excellent soundtrack of David Bowie covers by Brazilian singer-songwriter Seu Jorge, Zissou excels not only because of the hilarious gags delivered by some of the funniest actors in the business, but because of Anderson’s typical attention to detail in his shot compositions. It’s a gorgeous movie and a funny one. That’s not an easy combo to nail. —PV
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is available to stream on Hulu.
The best of the rest
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Year: 1971
Run time: 2h 1m
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, René Auberjonois
In an oeuvre of films that includes such undisputed classics as The Long Goodbye and M*A*S*H, this 1971 revisionist Western drama nonetheless stands out as the only one of Robert Altman’s works Roger Ebert championed as “perfect.” It’s not hard to see why — McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a tremendous period drama powered by the combined charisma of Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as an infamous gambler and a streetwise prostitute, respectively, who join forces to run a successful brothel in a Pacific Northwest mining town in 1902. When a mining company attempts to buy out and later extort McCabe, he’ll have to resort to desperate measures to fend off a trio of bounty hunters and protect what’s his.
Featuring beautiful cinematography of the forests and hills of West Vancouver by Vilmos Zsigmond, whip-sharp dialogue, compelling characters, and a haunting plaintive score composed of songs written by the one and only Leonard Cohen, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a exhilarating, tragic portrait of frontier life on the fringes of civilization that’s perfect for any fan of shows like Deadwood or films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. —TE
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is available to stream on Criterion Channel.